The honeymoon is over

It has been quite a lovely spring, but the honeymoon is over, and there are many ways every gardener in Sydney knows that. For starters, there was yesterday... if being billed as 'December 1, first day of summer' wasn't enough, the weather gods threw us a stinker of a hot, humid day with temperatures approaching the old century made worse, much worse, by stifling, muggy air. However, my sense that the honeymoon of spring had well and truly ended was with me before then. The finks have arrived in numbers. 

When you see ants farming aphids, you know the honeymoon is over and the hard work of gardening in this mostly beautiful climate has begun.

This bunch of new leaf shoots on my potted
Thai makrut lime is busy with the activity of
ants bringing black aphids to feast on the juicy
new shoots. The unpleasant fact that the ants
then 'harvest' the sweet body fluids from the
aphids is almost enough reason to detest their
heartless efficiency, but for me, it's the way they
are damaging a perfectly healthy and happy
lime tree that really gets me! Finks. 

Over in the Tahitian lime tree there's another honeymoon-
wrecker at work: stink bugs. I did a little posting about these
sap suckers a few weeks ago, when they were coloured in the
vivid orange which gives them the other name of bronze orange
bugs. Now they are adults and they're coming in waves, and
these adults are much harder to see than the colourful kids.

Who has the perfect climate for gardening? No-one. Sydney is a wonderful place to grow so many plants. It's so mild here where I am, fairly close to the coast, that we never get frosts in winter. Rainfall is pretty steady, year-round, and a quick glance out the back door any day of the year and all you see is lush greenery.

So my complaints about the honeymoon being over are merely an annual regret. Spring is such an energising, enjoyable time in the garden. Everything grows like mad, the pests only come in dribs and drabs, and most of the gardening stories are happy ones. 

What lies ahead in summer is still a lot of fun, but all plants now have uncertain futures (just like us). Pests and diseases are always on the agenda, bad summer storms can end a plant's career in 10 minutes, and so gardening becomes a bit more of a battle, yet I'm happy enough to get out there and do my bit.

Instead of finishing on that lamentable note, I really should keep things in balance by saying that almost everything is still happy and thriving. New flowers are appearing, the first flush of spring crops has already been harvested and the second set is up and growing, and the revamped succulent patch is getting into stride very nicely. So here are a few happy images of the kids in the backyard to finish. 

Plectranthus 'Mona Lavender' had a rough winter; I actually
fell into the bush at one stage during garden renovations, and so
I had to cut it back very heavily, but now it's starting to do what it
usually does for most of the year – flower its head off.

At the base of the plectranthus, a row of little gomphrenas
(little annual flowers) are matching the bigger plant behind
for enthusiasm in putting on a pinky-purple show.

Next door to the plectrantus is a potted
Tibouchina 'Groovy Baby' doing a purple thing.

And in a sunny spot these daisies are beaming innocent cheer.

OK, summer, bring it on! We're ready for whatever you have in store. (How about lots of sunshine with rain on Monday and Thursday nights? Too much to ask? Thought so).

Little suckers

Amid all the lovely surprises which keep me constantly fascinated here, the other side of the coin is that gardening is full of its annual and seasonal rituals, both good and bad. This morning we staged the Festival of the Stink Bugs, only slightly less dangerous than running with the bulls in Pamplona, and probably just as smelly.

Here's one of them now (well, if I had a camera with wide
angle lens hovering over the top of my lime tree, I could
have taken a shot with the caption "here's 12 of them now",
because that's what I discovered this morning, a lot of them.)
Sydney gardeners know this person well, the bronze orange
bug, also called the stink bug. 

This bug sucks sap from plants, and it loves citrus in particular.
It goes through three stages of life, each marked by a different
colouring. When young it's green and hard to see, then now, in
its middle stage, it's bright orange and easy to spot. If it makes it
to adulthood it's hard to see once more, as it's black.

Now, light infestations of this pest aren't so bad and you can ignore them if you like, but also at your peril, as heavy infestations can develop rapidly, which is why I get onto them as soon as I see them.

Wherever possible, I try to do everything the organic way in my garden, especially with food plants, but if that's not possible I then go for the least bad option. Most of the time I never reach into the 'least bad' bin of ideas, but for bronze orange bugs I do. Here's why...

One organic control for these pests is to physically knock them off the tree and drop them into a bucket of very hot water. That, my friends, is easier said than done! My lime tree is spiny, so it's not a great venue for bug whacking with a stick. And a precision bug whacker is needed to get them all. In many cases they just fall further down the tree and understandably try to hide. Getting up close to these bugs is also hazardous: they squirt an evil smelling spray when attacked (hence the name 'stink bug') and doing combat with them requires goggles and protective clothing, so the citrus spines don't make you look like an overly keen Easter crucifixion re-enactor. I have tried this 'knock them off' method but sorry, never again. 

Another commonly mentioned organic control is even more impractical than precision whacking. It's suggested you use a vacuum cleaner to suck the little suckers off the tree. Oh great! Even if it works (and I have my doubts... have they thought through the practicalities of outdoor vacuuming of spiny trees, really??) your vacuum cleaner ends up smelling like a high school chemistry lab disaster. Sorry, not my Dyson!

And so, alas, it's off to the 'least bad' bin for a solution. And it's not so bad, either. Pyrethrum spray does the trick. This is the spray made from chemicals which naturally occur in certain daisy-family flowers. I just zap the individual bugs with it, not the whole tree. Even if you sprayed the whole tree (which would be a seriously dumb thing for a backyard gardener with one tree to do) the 'withholding period' with pyrethrum is just one day. In zapping a dozen or so bugs I reckon I sprayed about 2% of the tree, max.

And pyrethrum works. Some stink bugs succumb quickly to it, others take a few minutes to drop off the peg.

And so the moral of this story is this: if you have a backyard citrus tree in Australia, go outside and check it for bronze orange bugs now. October-November is the peak season for them. I'll leave the business of what you do next up to you.